Pete Amachree Brief: Romans: Research

The final brief we have to create was set by Concept Artist Pete Amachree.  The brief is a fairly simple set up.  "What would the Romans have been like if they electricity had been introduced to their society. Show three stages of advancement from 60AD, 160Ad and 260 AD."

At first, this seems like a fairly simple brief.  But the more I thought about it, the harder it actually became.  If the Romans did have electricity, how the hell would they be able to harness it or store it?  More questions like this arouse the more I thought about it.

Anyway, to try and clear my head, I did some pretty intense research...

Rome:

Additional Environments:

Soldiers:

I can't pin exactly what I want to achieve with this brief.  This is going to harder than I first thought.

Jack Couvela Brief: Assassin's Creed: Prop and Building Design

I quickly moved through the prop element of the brief.  I wanted create a Victorian based gun.  So, as usual, I did my research first...

Gun's aren't a new thing to Assassin's Creed and having a weapon with a limited fire power/clip capacity helps keep the player of the keep vary their tactics (rather than just shooting everyone...).  There's quite a lot of varying styles to choose from and I also wanted something decorative for my design.  So sketches...

My first few designs were way off the mark.  They were quite steampunky and didn't really belong in the Assassin's universe.  They seemed to fit better in something like Bioshock.  Assassin's Creed is always built on the foundation of a believable and 'real' world.  Everything needs to reflect this, including the weapons.  So I refined my design to look more...normal.

After choosing my design, I moved forward into painting the final thing...

I applied a very similar logic to my building design.  I began with the research stage...

 This lead me to designing a variety of sketches.  At this stage, I was trying to look for an interesting shape, whilst maintaining the idea that the player can climb and free-run.

Choosing my design (design 'M'), I blocked out a fairly basic model using Google SketchUp.

 After selecting a rendered view I liked, I painted the final piece using PhotoShop.